Obituary

Hortense Calisher

Author Hortense Calisher poses for a portrait at her apartment in New York, on November 26, 1997. Photograph: Wyatt Counts/AP

The books of Hortense Calisher, who has died aged 97, would fill more than a yard of shelf, even though she did not publish her first novel until she was 50. As it was, driven to catch up, she continued writing into her 90s. From short stories by way of novellas to 500-page epics and back again, she tackled diverse subjects which included suburban feuding, the monologue of a liberated woman and outer space.

Born in New York to southern, Jewish parents, she was brought up in a close-knit, music- and book-filled world of immigrants who had prospered, their money accrued from sales of elegant soap and perfume. Her father did not have children until his 50s (and to have a grandmother in her 90s gave the young Hortense, from the beginning, a sense of time). Hortense's youth, however, coincided with the Depression, when the family moved from 10 rooms to four, and her father had to find another job at the age of 70. After graduating from Barnard College, New York, she worked as a waitress and in a department store (where she gained "a smart worm's eye of the place"), a model and social worker. Then, in 1935, she married an engineer, Heaton Heffelfinger; his work took them from one dull town to another before they settled in the Hudson Valley, which was then a "gentle idyll of a country still only half-commuter".

While she was bringing up two children, her mind was simmering with ideas for short stories: these eventually found, in 1948, an outlet in the New Yorker. She had been "held back by fear", she said, from writing; of her efforts not being a patch on the great books with which she had been brought up. In 1951, these autobiographical stories, and others, were collected as In the Absence of Angels. The ensuing decade - until her first, hefty novel - was occupied by a Guggenheim award, which took her to England for a year "to think" - indeed, to move in various London circles - and by divorce, complicated by concern for a troubled daughter. In a phrase worthy of her fiction, she said of this period, "I relearn a lot, even the city loneliness has its savor - one that a mind like mine, however, has to be wary of."

That was all to change, for she met the writer Curtis Harnack, and they married in 1959, he becoming president of the Yaddo artists' colony and of the School of American Ballet. Within two years, she completed False Entry (1961), whose 600 pages startled those familiar with her stories. Set in locations as diverse as Golders Green and the American South, it ranged across the decades, its plot turning upon a discovery about the Ku Klux Klan. It spawned an equally hefty sort-of-sequel, The New Yorkers (1969).

Able to write from a male point of view, Calisher also had an aphoristic touch that brings fresh air to a narrative at risk of mere windiness. Books followed at a clip, whether embracing the twin concerns of archaeology and extra-terrestrial life, as in Journal from Ellipsia (1965), or the plainer prose of Textures of Life (1963), which tells of a Manhattan couple who, through their troubles, bring together those of an older generation. Such characters also animated Age (1987), in which she wrote: "I reach across her body for the inhalator, holding it like a weapon... our nest here still smells of the sexual."

Disparate as they are, her novels reveal a preoccupation with the romantic and the pragmatic, as in the narrative of Queenie (1971). Here, she not only asserts that "every 16-year-old is a pornographer" but notes "privately I'm still in a very romantic state - which as every girl knows, means that she pants you know for what, you just don't know for who".

To teach in various universities can hardly have been humdrum, to judge by Herself (1972), which purports to be "an autobiographical work" but ranges widely to form an ordered mish-mash of pieces. In it, she makes such self-effacing remarks as, "I am old enough to have seen clothing repeat itself, even on me, and to enjoy it."

On reading the book, the writer Bernard Malamud said, "Why, Hortense. You're an intellectual!" She always downplayed such claims, "avoiding the New York literary life, which so many writers take postures on... to me, New York is quite another thing - a home town, a habitat, full of ordinary people and their parties."

Manhattan after dark is the culmination of a 1966 novella, The Railway Police, which tells of a bald-headed, bewigged social worker who glimpses an arrest from a train. The story was so persuasive that one television interviewer insinuated that Calisher's hair was not her own. Head bowed, she challenged him to pull it off; he declined. Such was Calisher's independent spirit, that one must hope that an English publisher will issue her last novel, Sunday Jews (2003), and a further memoir, Tattoo for a Slave (2004).

She is survived by Curtis Harnack, and by Peter Heffelfinger, the son of her first marriage.

• Hortense Calisher, writer, born 20 December 1911; died 13 January 2009

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